Archive for category: Halifax Screening Picks

Hello and welcome to Halifax film picks, summer blockbuster edition. Yep, there’s not a lot of art-house action to be had in Halifax at the moment, but action-action is plentifully available. Perhaps the most fun option to be had this week (apart from treating yourself to another repeat viewing of Mad Max: Fury Road) is a free Friday night outdoor screening of X-Men: Days of Future Past at Dartmouth Crossing. Don’t get too excited, nerds—it’s not the Rogue Cut.

If you’re up for a road trip to Liverpool, the Astor has Ex Machina on Wednesday. It may not exactly be a blockbuster, but hey, until Star Wars: The Force Awakens hits, it’s your chance to see Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac doing a sci-fi team-up.

This Sunday, Halifax Pride has a fundraiser screening of the Wachowskis’ 1996 pop classic Bound, at the Oxford. Also on Sunday, if you missed While We’re Young during its Oxford run, you’ve got a second chance if you’re able to drive to Wolfville for the Fundy Film Society screening.

Love & Mercy, the highly touted portrait of The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, has arrived for a run out at the Scotiabank Cinema Bayers Lake, fuelled by incredibly positive reviews across the board.

The Thrillema returns this Wednesday with the most totemic of Italian horror films—Dario Argento’s Suspiria. The intense filtered colours and forced lighting, not to mention the pulsing music score by Goblin, give this film a unique and enduring signature.

With a fifth Terminator film on the immediate horizon (July 1), Cineplex is offering a chance this Thursday to see the original on the big screen. This is a one-time-only deal, screening simultaneously at Park Lane and Dartmouth Crossing.

This Sunday, Wolfville’s Fundy Film Society has A Brilliant Young Mind (a.k.a. X+Y), which features Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins in its excellent cast.

Wednesday (June 17) — Suspiria, The Thrillema @ the Museum of Natural History, 8pm, free, advance tickets available at Strange Adventures.
— Trick or Treaty, Halifax Central Library, 7pm, free. The first film by an indigenous filmmaker to be selected to the Masters program at TIFF, this doc is presented by the NFB Film Club in anticipation of National Aboriginal Day (June 21). Alanis Obomsawin, Canada, 2014, 85 minutes.— The King and I, Cineplex Dartmouth Crossing, 7pm, $6. Walter Lang, USA, 1956, 133 minutes.

This ninth edition of HIFF is once again taking place at the Neptune Studio Theatre, over four nights. The festival is as indie-alternative-avant as it gets in Halifax, and the name says it—the spotlight is on makers as well as films, which means Q&As galore and a chance to learn about the craft. In addition to multiple showcases of short films there is also a third feature from Polish directors Anka and Wilhlem Sasnal, the “nearly dialogue-less” Parasite, and the Halifax-shot “no-budget dramedy” Here Kitty, Kitty from Argentina’s Santiago Giralt.

After the festival, this Sunday, you can get your Anna Leonowens on at a couple of Cineplex matinee screenings of The King and I.

This is also an excellent week for a film road trip. One of last year’s very best festival films, the Irish-Troubles-set thriller ’71, is screening Wednesday at the historic Astor Theatre in Liverpool (easily my favourite place in Nova Scotia to see a movie). And this Sunday, the Fundy Film Society is screening Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria, featuring raved-about performances by Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart.

June is here, and that means that it’s road trip season—and one of my favourite Nova Scotia summer activities is getting out of town and checking out some of the excellent film series screenings around the province. Starting this week, and through the summer, I’ll be adding Annapolis Valley and South Shore film screenings to my weekly picks.

There are a couple of excellent such opportunities this week. On Tuesday, the King’s Theatre Film Society in Annapolis Royal has Red Army, the feature doc (carrying an exec-producer credit for Werner Herzog) that tells the story of the most successful dynasty in sports history—the Soviet national hockey team, from the perspective of captain Slava Fetisov. And on Sunday, the Fundy Film Society in Wolfville has Phoenix, the 2014 festival favourite that re-teams the director (Christian Petzold) and star (Nina Hoss) of Barbara, one of my favourites from 2012.

Meanwhile in Halifax, Saturday you can check out “Incredifest – The Incredible Film Festival” which in a bit of perhaps genre-appropriate marketing overstatement, bills itself as “the best independent science fiction, fantasy and horror films from around the world” but is really just a two-hour showcase of 12 short films followed by a low-profile Japanese-ish zombie feature from 2011, Schoolgirl Apocalypse. But with local talent like Jason Eisener (“One Last Dive”) and Angus Swantee (“Torturous”) on the short film lineup it seems like an excellent bet for genre fans. Note: the festival website refers to the venue as the “Maritime Museum of Natural History,” but it seems otherwise clear that the screenings are at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History and not the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.

The Dal Art Gallery noir series wraps up this Wednesday with Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, starring Harry Belafonte—”one of the final films in the Noir cycle, a heist-gone-wrong flick that directly addresses race issues, all to a cool Modern Jazz Quartet soundtrack.”

The Sunday afternoon screening of Ida will be preceded on Saturday evening by The Death of Captain Pilecki, a 2006 made-for-TV bio-pic directed by Ryszard Bugajski, whose film Interrogation was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990.

The Oxford this week has Thomas Vinterberg’s Far From the Madding Crowd, which you would think would be pretty near the top of any list of most unnecessary remakes—but hey, it’s getting way better reviews than the new Poltergeist, so…

There are not many one-off screenings in Halifax this week (and that’s quite OK, if you’re as excited about Obey Convention as I am), but The Thrillema is back with a screening of the original Poltergeist this Wednesday. With the 2015 remake dropping this Friday, the timing is basically perfect for another look at the OTT original that remains seared into the brains of 80s kids everywhere.

If you’re looking for some multiplex entertainment on your Victoria Day Monday off, you could do worse than to check out the brilliant Mad Max: Fury Road, which I am convinced has set a new standard against which future action films will be judged. Though the film was not shot with 3D cameras as originally planned, it is quite obviously intended to be seen in 3D—and a successful post-conversion, I’d say. But you probably weren’t depending on me to tell you that…

Cineplex Oxford and Dartmouth Crossing are both showing Ex Machina this week—the extremely well-received directorial debut of Alex Garland, the screenwriter for Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Sunshine. One of the many four-star reviews online comes from Matt Zoller Seitz, who effuses: “real science fiction is about ideas, which means that real science fiction is rarely seen on movie screens, a commercially minded canvas that’s more at ease with sensation and spectacle… Ex Machina is a rare and welcome exception to that norm.”

This Wednesday it will be 100 years, and exactly one week, since the birth of Orson Welles, and the Dal Art Gallery film noir series will be screening the unimpeachable, but not unrevisable, classic Touch of Evil, which is famous not only for its opening eight-minute tracking shot, but also for its chicanerous release & redaction history. The UK Blu-ray release has no less than five presentations of the film, including the theatrical release version, a preview release version, and the 1998 reconstructed version, which I suspect is what we will see on Wednesday.

With Montage of Heck not scheduled to screen on HBO Canada at any time in the foreseeable future, the only legal way to see the Kurt Cobain documentary in this country is to go to a one-off theatre screening tonight at 7pm.

Cineplex has a number of other special event screenings this week as well, including a live Rifftrax commentary-screening of the love-to-hate-it indie The Room on Wednesday, as well as family-friendly screenings this weekend of The Wizard of Oz and Oklahoma!.

There are just 3 weeks left in the Dal Art Gallery noir series and this week’s selection is noteworthy for being in colour and directed by the Canadian-born Allan Dwan—Slightly Scarlet, with John Payne, Rhonda Fleming, and Arlene Dahl.